In an object-oriented application development environment, application developers may model application behavior through the use of development objects, which may then be generated into corresponding runtime objects to be executed within an application framework. The runtime objects are generated according to the current generator state, which may be based on user-selected settings that define how the generation is to occur (e.g., whether to include additional debugging code or informational messages in log files, etc.).
When a developer makes changes to particular development objects or user settings, the developer usually requests a regeneration of the corresponding runtime objects in order to verify that the changes are correctly reflected in the corresponding runtime objects.
If particular corresponding runtime objects had been previously generated according to the state of their corresponding development objects and the current generator state, the application development environment would retrieve the runtime objects, rather than regenerate them from scratch.
However, current application development environments retrieve the previously generated runtime objects from a central server that stores information regarding the previously generated runtime objects' user settings. The retrieval can take much time, especially when the runtime objects are large.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method that selectively retrieves from local storage those previously generated runtime objects that had been locally stored.